On the Web Application General Settings page, in the Recycle Bin section, configure any of the following settings:

Under Recycle Bin Status, select On or Off to specify whether the Recycle Bins of all the sites within this Web application are turned on or turned off. The default value is On.

If you turn off the Recycle Bins, all of the files in both the first and second stage Recycle Bins are deleted. Deleting these files can take a long time, depending on the number of Recycle Bins and how much data they contain.

Under Delete items in the Recycle Bin, select either After or Never.

If you select After, in the corresponding box, type the number of days to wait before the Recycle Bins are emptied (that is, the number of days that the items in Recycle Bins remain in a deleted state). The default value is 30 days.

If you select Never, the Recycle Bins are never emptied automatically.

Under Second stage Recycle Bin, select either Add or Off.

If you select Add, in the corresponding box, type the percentage of the site quota to add for second-stage Recycle Bin capacity. The default value is 50 percent.

If you select Off, site collection administrators are not able to recover items deleted from end-user Recycle Bins.